Syrian suspected of espionage beaten and paraded through Tripoli, Lebanon

Beaten, bruised, stripped half-naked and paraded for three kilometres with a rope around his neck: this was the pubic humiliation suffered by a Syrian Alawite in a Sunni neighbourhood of Tripoli, Lebanon, on Monday afternoon. His tormentors accused him of having links to the Syrian regime.

The man was attacked while he was at the Dahab souk, an open air market in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, located near the border with Syria. The market is known to be a meeting place for the city’s Sunni Salafists. According to our Observers in Tripoli, the men who captured him believed he carried documentation indicating that he belonged to the Syrian secret service. The man was stripped naked by his captors, who wrote on his torso: “I am an Alawite shabiha”. “Shabiha” is the name given to armed regime supporters in Syria. After violently beating the man and parading him half-naked through the streets, his captors handed him over to military intelligence officers, who then interrogated and released him.

WARNING: This video may shock viewers.

Video showing the victim being paraded around the streets of Tripoli by his captors. This video was widely relayed on Lebanese TV stations.

Eighty percent of Tripoli’s population are Sunnis, who are predominantly opposed to Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Al-Asaad himself is Alawite, which is a branch of Shiism. However, the city also includes Jabal Mohsen, an Alawite neighbourhood that supports the Syrian president. Since May 2012, as the Syrian conflict has raged on, Tripoli has seen regular fighting between militia from Bab al-Tabbaneh, a neighbourhood that has aligned itself to the Syrian cause, and Alawite militia from Jabal Mohsen. For our Observer, Monday’s incident serves as a warning from Sunnis to Alawites who may be tempted to venture into certain parts of the city where they are not welcome.

“This was a message to Alawites to warn them that anyone suspected of having links to the Syrian regime could suffer the same fate”

Abou Baker (not his real name) lives in Tripoli, where he works in communications. He is Sunni.

I wasn’t there when the man was paraded around, but I spoke to witnesses. At the market, a child heard him speak, recognised his Syrian accent and alerted adults. These Salafists then stopped him and asked for his identity papers. He had a Syrian ID card and a pass that allowed him to cross between the two countries, but surely not a Syrian secret service card, as people claim. If he really were a spy, he would never walk around with such papers on him!

I believe this man had nothing to do with Assad’s regime; he was just Syrian. For me, there was no reason to arrest him. In Tripoli, Alawites work together with Sunnis every day in perfect harmony, apart from sporadic fighting related to the conflict in Syria. If you ask me, the aim of those who stopped and punished this man was simple: it was a way to send a message to Alawites to warn them that anyone suspected of having links to the Syrian regime could suffer the same fate.

The fact that the police didn’t intervene when the man was seen beaten and paraded through the streets with a rope around his neck shows, once again, that the Lebanese state has failed to keep a lid on tensions on the streets of Tripoli.

Comments

God help the Sunnis when this war is over. They have allowed monsters among them to highjack their religion and paint them as the most barbarics of God's creation. When this war ends (and it will like all wars) the monsters among them will turn against any and all moderate Sunnis. Whoever is capable of doing this, is capable of doing any thing to any one, Sunni or not.